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Next Generation Street Lighting Toolkit

Public sector LED street lighting is an emerging market with tremendous potential for local governments to significantly reduce electricity costs, environmental impacts and maintenance while enhancing lighting quality. Technology is not the major issue. The real challenge is money and appropriate funding models will be critical drivers in the transformation of street lighting. Upgrading existing city street lighting is a capital intensive investment undertaking at a time when municipal governments are fiscally challenged. This toolkit is provided as a resource to help move these projects forward from start to successful implementation.

Opportunity

Public sector LED street lighting is an emerging market with tremendous potential for local governments to significantly reduce electricity costs, environmental impacts and maintenance while enhancing lighting quality. Technology is not the major issue. The real challenge is money and appropriate funding models will be critical drivers in the transformation of street lighting. Upgrading existing city street lighting is a capital intensive investment undertaking at a time when municipal governments are fiscally challenged. This toolkit is provided as a resource to help move these projects forward from start to successful implementation.

RELATED

Lighting a Path to Energy and Dollar Savings for Your Community – Why you should be considering LED street lighting retrofits

Congress mandated DOE to accelerate LED technology use. “It is estimated that switching to LED lighting over the next two decades could save the country $250 billion in energy costs over that period, reduce the electricity consumption for lighting by nearly one half.”

A recent Pike Research report highlights to expected growth of LED street lighting – “Dramatically falling costs and rising efficiencies of LED lamps are driving up sales. Costs have fallen as much as 50% over the last 18 months and are expected to continue falling for years to come. LED lamps allow for better dimming control than standard streetlights, and their electronics allow for easy integration of control nodes. Rising sales of LED lamps will therefore drive up the adoption of smart street lighting systems. Pike Research expects the market for smart street lighting to grow steadily over the remainder of this decade. Shipments of smart street lighting systems, which will be under 200 worldwide for 2012, will reach more than 1,100 in 2020.

Policy

“US Conference of Mayors endorses the use of solid-state LED streetlight luminaires for lighting public streets and rights-of-way...”

Finance

Financing Strategies – finding the money (and terms) to do the project

Funding sources for you project may come from one or several combined sources including: state and federal government grants, utility programs, Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), as well as manufacturer’s programs. An excellent resource can be found in Chapter 4 Financial Analysis & Approaches of a guide entitled Next Generation Streetlights published jointly by the Bay Area Climate Collaborative, The California Lighting Technology Center and Energy Solutions.

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Bob Graves. M.S., associate director of the Governing Institute, is the designated content curator for the FutureStructure initiative and also a co-founder of e.Republic, the parent organization of Governing.